Midnight Wind Music

Good songwriting is not easy because you have to compress a story into a song that lasts only three minutes or so! Some operas take four or more hours to tell a story, but we don't have that luxury.

Make your opening lines memorable by setting the stage for your story. A great example of this is the wonderful song "I Can't Make You Love Me" sung by Bonnie Raitt and written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin. The first two lines are a peroration or repeated phrase designed to emphasize something: "Turn down the lights, turn down the bed; Turn down these voices inside my head." The listener is hooked because we want to know what happens next: why are there voices, for instance.

Another way to have memorable lyrics is to use unusual words in your song. Check out "Midnight Sun" written by Erroll Garner and Johnny Mercer. The first verse of this song uses "palace, chalice, and aurora borealis" in its rhyme scheme. These are not normally words you would include in a song!

Even if you're not a Joni Mitchell fan, you might want to look at her 1998 book The Complete Poems and Lyrics, as she is a painter and her songs are filled with images of color and texture. Her rhyme scheme is particularly clever in "Marcie" where she rhymes "curtain" with "shirt and" and each verse has a different symbolic meaning for the colors red and green. You can listen to this song on Joni's first album Song to a Seagull.

Studying the lyrics of masterful songwriters will always help you to improve!

It's one thing to talk about writing great lyrics, and it's another to set them to the right music. To hear some of my songs, go to MySpace.com, click on Search, and type in "Viki Christensen" to launch my page.

Some have a refrain or chorus, some have an introduction, and some just speed willy-nilly to the end (Young Love, in particular). This melange of songs provides examples of different ways to use your lyrics. Be sure they tell a story, and people will relate to them. If it's not happening in their lives, they will know someone it does affect.

All of these songs were recorded in early September of 1995, 16 years ago, and all were done in one live take, as we had a tiny audience there. The earliest songs were written in 1970, and the latest were composed in the summer of 1995. Across these 25 years are another 50+ songs. In my opinion, some aren't worth the paper they're written on, and they serve as bad examples. However, even these entry-level works are part of the process you have to experience in order to create the memorable pieces. Don't hold back while you're waiting to birth a masterpiece. Write now!!!